"Consumer Computing Services"

In my posting last month about "Google vs MicroHoo?", I postulated that Microsoft and Yahoo! need each other in order to compete with Google for online services like spreadsheets, email, word processing, community, etc.

A Cnet blogger, Charles Cooper, has rumoured that this would be "Microsoft's Google killer strategy". This is based on Nick Carr's blog post that Microsoft is embarking on this "software plus services" strategy.

Microsoft is now rolling up its sleeves in this arena because:

1) "its business and marketing priority has been the rollout of the recent upgrades to its core Windows and Office programs. It's had to milk the cash cows... The upgrades have been out for more than a year, and, despite some glitches, have generated a lot of cash for the company."

2) "it's been building out the backend infrastructure - the data center network - required to run web apps reliably and on a large scale... As for its infrastructure, a massive new data center near Chicago is expected to come online this year, adding to the capacity of the new centers the company has built or bought in Washington, Texas, and California."

CNet quotes Ballmer:

"We can have service-based offerings that essentially line up with our information worker infrastructure products--Exchange and SharePoint, Office Communications Server--if we have instances that sort of line up to what people do, development and deployment applications, database applications, etc. That is more value. We can help people reduce management costs, deployment costs, operations costs, data center costs..."

As I said, this is the next big war between the tech giants. It may be corporate at first, but Microsoft will make plenty of money from consumers directly. And while they are both building out data centers, I have NOT heard that Microsoft is locating next to power stations though..... Maybe they will just build their own nuclear power plants since these are coming back in style now. They only cost a couple of billion dollars a piece, and Microsoft can sell the excess output back to the grid!

Anyhow, I think "Consumer Computing Services" will catch on, or CCS, or ConCompServ (in the tradition of "newspeak" from the Orwellian 1984 World). Terms like "online" and "web" will be superfluous, redundant and even passé in a world where we are always connected to the Matrix - I mean - Network.